A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough Read Online Free PDF

this yes, this no, mean for the next few minutes, the next few hours, days, weeks, or years?
    Our wanting to be able to control, predict, or ensure a good and hopeful future can make us feel overwhelmed in everymoment, as each and every choice will either keep open, or eliminate, countless future possibilities; we seal the fate of our lives and those around us. Who wouldn’t feel exhausted and overwhelmed if we were always, every single day, in this terrible position of unbearable responsibility?
    But we are not. Because the only real authority we ever have over the course, direction, and trajectory of our lives is how we listen whenever we are met with one of these relentless choice points, how we listen for what feels, in this moment, to be the most clear, true, next right thing. In the same way, the following moment will offer its own new and unexpected choice, which helps create the next moment, and our moments shape our days, as our days become our lives. In short, we find the path through our own life by following the thread.
    How do we do such a thing? How do we follow some invisible, intangible thread that runs through our life? How can we even know it exists? The most honest answer I can give is to simply turn around and look back at the story of how your own life has emerged and unfolded. Can you not see the thread that, perhaps unseen or unavailable at the time, helped you choose, like our little stream, whether to go right or left, whether to pool up and wait, only to later spill over?
    If we can trust that we are good and whole, if we trust that our hearts, minds, and bodies know how to find and recognize life, always life, how can we possibly doubt that there still remains in our hand at this moment the very same thread that guided us safely here?
    But we ache for a blueprint, a manual; we need specifics. How do we follow this thread, how do we choose this next right thing? What tools or practices, what knowledge or resource dowe turn to in order to find our way? First, as we have seen, we begin by choosing to nourish and strengthen a deep faith and trust in our own inner knowing, our intuitive capacity to listen, the reliable wisdom of our bodies, minds, and hearts.
    Second, it is useful to clearly define the difference between how we make choices, and why we make them. Gerald May, in his book The Awakened Heart , posits a contrast between love and efficiency. Efficiency, he says, is the how of life: “how we meet and handle the demands of daily living, how we survive, grow, and create, how we deal with stress, how effective we are in our functional roles and activities.”
    Love, he says, is the why of life: “why we are functioning at all, what we want to be efficient for .” As we grow older and more responsible for people and things, we are conditioned to believe that efficiency is more important than love. This is a common and universal trap into which we all fall again and again. We want to take good care of people or projects because we care for them. May offers as examples parents who become preoccupied with efficiency—what are my children eating, are they involved in enough activities, will they get ready in time for school—when the how of caring for them eclipses the small, tender hurts, needs, or fears our children may be feeling in the moment.
    How often have we allowed the how of our choices to overshadow why we made them? We decide to take our children to the park because of our love for them. It has been cold and wet all week, and now we have a sunny day at last. We set the time and start preparing everyone to get up on time, eat properly, get dressed and ready to leave at the appointed hour. But invariably there is a lost toy, a forgotten mitten, a skinned knee, eachof which becomes an exasperating frustration and obstacle to getting to the park as planned. Perhaps one child announces he is in the middle of a book and would rather stay home and read; another asks if she might have a